**The Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution** [View All]

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There have been many discussions on DU about the evils of corporations, and this magazine of spiritual progressives, TIKKUN, has a proposal. I agree with them that it's worth discussion.

http://www.tikkun.org/community/social_responsibility_amendment


The Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

A vision of a new bottom line for corporations, that challenges market notions of efficiency: not merely by the profits they reap but by how they have impacted our ecosystems and communities. Just as the ERA never passed, yet had a monumental impact on public discourse and understanding, the campaign for the SRA could similarly shift the dimensions of American political discussion.
--Every corporation doing business within the US (whether located here or abroad) with annual income of over $20 million must receive a new corporate charter every twenty years, and these new charters will only be granted to corporations who canprove a history of social responsibility as measured by an Ethical Impact Report which will measure the company's sensitivity to the needs of the environment, the community, and its employees.

The Ethical Impact Report will be compiled by 3 different constituencies: the corporation itself, the workers (under conditions of confidentiality), and relevant community organizations around the world who wish to present their case about the social responsibility of the corporation. Cases shall be decided by Social Responsibiity Grand Juries selected to be representative of the economic, social, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of the United States. In cases in which these Grand Juries find insufficient social responsibility, they may assign the assets of the corporation to a community organization or other corporation which can show that it has a better plan for ensuring high levels of social responsibility while continuing to make the corporation survive.If no such group can be found, the Grand Jury can simply suspend the operations of the corporation, or mandate specific changes in corporate behavior and fine and imprison corporate officials and board members who do not implement the plan.

Most American politicians fear to challenge corporate power not only because they need the financial support during elections, but for a deeper and more reasonable reason as well: they fear that corporations can always threaten to move their base of operations, leaving joblessness and economic devastation in their wake.

The various branches of the progressive movement each seek to obtain some minimal restraints on corporate power. But the history of the environmental movement's reformism demonstrates the problem here: for every single victory won at the expenditure of huge amounts of energy, there emerge three or four new areas in which unrestrained consumption and the extension of the market to every corner of the world threaten the life-support system of the planet while simultaneously developing finding new labor markets to pay exploitative wages. And as the ethos of selfishness and materialism generated by the market and glorified by the media as "human nature" increasingly presents itself as "common sense" to the peoples of the world, resistance seems foolish to many who decide that the best they can do is to try to "make it"--even at the expense of so many others around the world who we know will never get their share. While some may take refuge from the selfishness and love corroding aspects of the market by attempting to build ultra-nationalist or religious fundamentalist communities around a different vision, most will passively acquiesce, convinced by the Thomas Friedman rhetoric that "there is no alternative." But there is an alternative: to change the progressive agenda from its previous focus on "inclusion," (making sure that those in the US who had been "left out" of the rewards of the capitalist system would get a fairer portion) to a new focus on "changing the bottom line." In its deepest sense, this strategy, which we call "a politics of meaning," aims to change the very definition of productivity and efficiency, so that we see institutions as efficient or productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize people's capacities to be loving and caring, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and able to respond to the world not only in terms of how we can "use it" but also with awe and wonder.

That's why we at TIKKUN have developed the Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the US Constitution.

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